Putting the system to work
Resetting ANWB’s design system into a foundation teams can trust.
Situation
ANWB’s design system had grown for years without a moment to step back. It had grown unreliable, it served one channel while the ambition covered all of them, and it ran on pragmatic choices rather than a clear vision. To the teams meant to build with it, it behaved like a black box: hard to predict, so they worked around it, skipped updates, and the drift compounded.
Approach
We joined ANWB across two engagements, embedded in the team rather than advising from outside. A black box is not fixed by adding to it, so the first engagement set one strategy spanning design and code, then laid a foundation teams could rely on: a shared token setup and the first components, built once in Figma and Storybook. We returned to design the handover components teams needed and train the people who would use them.
Result
ANWB came away with a defined strategy spanning design and code, a shared token foundation and the start of a component library in both design and code. The second engagement turned that into adoption: handover components and the training to put them to work. Not a finished system but a reset: a direction and a foundation ANWB’s own team can build on and trust, instead of a black box to route around.